Poles uncover 6,000-year-old tombs of babies in Sudan: report
PR dla Zagranicy
Victoria Bieniek
03.04.2018 11:57
Six-thousand-year-old remains of newborns and foetuses have been found in ceramic vessels by Polish archaeologists working in Sudan, the onet.pl website has reported.
Photo: Laterjay/Pixabay (CC0)
Four such remains were dug up last year at the site of a former settlement and cemetery in Omdurman, Sudan’s second-largest city, the website said.
The discovery was unusual because of the ceramic bowl-shaped coffins the children were laid in and because of the numerous items that had been placed alongside the small bodies, onet.pl said. They included necklaces made of ostrich shell and bone beads, small ceramic items and oyster shells.
They are the oldest burials of their kind so far uncovered in Africa, the Polish scientists said, according to the website. They probably predate the oldest previous discovery by about 500 years.
Polish archaeologists have been working at the dig in Omdurman since ancient remains were hit upon during road work in 2012.
According to Maciej Jórdeczka of the Polish Academy of Sciences' Institute of Archeology and Ethnology in Poznań, western Poland, the remains probably belonged to infants who were stillborn or died shortly after birth, onet.pl reported. (vb/di/gs)